Dramaturging the Moment

While I call Philadelphia my home, I have been working long-distance on a project for playwright Caridad Svich’s new play The Way of Waterabout the aftermath of the BP Oil Spill. So far, it has been a rich research project (that I will hopefully post about later this month as now over 40 theater companies and universities are reading the play to raise awareness about the two-year anniversary of the disaster), it has also been an opportunity to collaborate with other dramaturgs! Dramaturgy is often a solo act, so it is quite delightful when I have the chance to be a part of a dramaturgy team. Since January, playwright/dramaturg R. Alex Davis has been a part of the team preparing for the reading scheme in April 2012 and it’s been great to ‘divide and conquer’ as the research on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill is quite extensive. Together, we have created both a research website and a blog so that all the theaters participating can access our dramaturgy.

Credit: Abigail Feinberg and Quentin Pharr

We were then thrilled to discover that UMASS Amherst was also creating new work in response to the BP Oil Spill disaster. Tasked by their Dean to devise new work to the theme “The Gulf Oil Spill: Lessons for the Future”, dramaturg Megan McClain has been organizing a festival for their Theatre Department. Not only did Megan arrange for Caridad’s new play to be read during their festival, but she’s also shared with us her research from the Gulf region. It’s not just ‘good timing’—but an example of artistic generosity and the spirit of dramaturgical collaboration. And if we also count dramaturgs Adewunmi Oke and Alison Bowie who have worked on these devised pieces for UMASS’s festival—that makes five dramaturgs concurrently researching and creating new work responding to the BP Oil Spill crisis. We hope you enjoy this article by Megan as we’re all responding artistically to the crisis by asking those dramaturgical questions of this continuing national crisis. The BP Oil Spill has long-ranging impacts and these new works created will hopefully raise a dialogue of how we can engage with this issue and not forget those Americans who are currently struggling because of this disaster.—Heather Helinsky, freelance dramaturg

Beyond the Horizon: A Devised Theater Festival

by Megan McClain

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon off-shore drilling unit exploded, killing 11 people. For the next three months nearly 5 million barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, negatively impacting plant, animal, and human life. The full extent of the catastrophe’s aftermath is still unknown. Though the news media’s coverage of the spill has dissipated in the ensuing years, artists and activists continue to give voice to the lasting devastation of this event. Addressing the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its position in a long line of environmental disasters, the Beyond the Horizon Festival presented by the UMass Amherst Theatre Department seeks to use performance to map our changing relationship to the natural world and offer models of community response to ecological crisis. Developed by a interdisciplinary community of theatre artists, musicians, dancers, and environmentalists, the Beyond the Horizon Festival offers three original devised theatre pieces that use the power of performance to illuminate the interactions between humans and the environment.

The first piece, What Have We Learned, uses letters, dance, and song to explore how the BP Gulf oil spill has effected the lives of those in the Gulf and beyond. To whom it may concern addresses how we struggle to communicate during times of crisis in a world pulsing with the din of suffering, disconnection, and corruption. The final piece, Nightingale, imagines a post-apocalyptic society in which natural organisms are strictly controlled and shows what happens when one bird throws the whole system into shock.

Members of the Beyond the Horizon artistic team are also participating in a reading of Caridad Svich’s new play, The Way of Water, presented in collaboration with NoPassport Theatre alliance and press as part of a nationwide and international reading scheme. The Way of Water interrogates the BP Gulf oil spill by exposing the continued negative effects of the disaster on the health and livelihoods of those in the region. This network of readings across the country joins theatre artists in a larger conversation about the hidden and ignored human suffering of those exposed to contaminated water in the Gulf.

Silent Spring author Rachel Carson once wrote, “In nature, nothing exists alone.” The same can be said of theatre. Though theatre has been described as the site for exploring the human condition, that human condition is intrinsically linked to the conditions of all other life on this planet. Theatre gives us a space to play out sites of connection and disconnection. It creates a place to reassess our destructive actions and celebrate the most beautiful wonders of the world around us. Above all, it offers the chance to rediscover and announce what poet Mary Oliver calls our “place in the family of things.”

The Beyond the Horizon Festival runs April 5-7 and April 10-14 at 8pm and April 14 at 2pm in the Curtain Theatre of the Fine Arts Center on the UMass Amherst campus. The reading of Caridad Svich’s new play, The Way of Water, will be held at 4:30pm on April 10th at Food for Thought Books, 106 N. Pleasant St. Amherst, MA. For more information visit our festival blog.

The Way of Water by Caridad Svich was developed at the 2011 Winter Writers Retreat 2011 at the Lark New Play Development Center in New York City and was further developed at a Lark round-table reading in February 2012 directed by Jose Zayas, dramaturgy by Heather Helinsky, R. Alex Davis, and Suzy Fay, and actors Lanna Joffrey, Alfredo Narciso, Caitlin McDonough-Thayer, Bobby Plasencia. For more about the project: http://nopassport.org/wayofwater

In New London, CT, the Monte Cristo Cottage- the summer home of playwright Eugene O’Neill – provides the setting for two of his best known works, namely AH! WILDERNESS!and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. If you visit the cottage, you can actually position yourself in the rooms as they are described in the stage directions for LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, and become enlivened by the world of the play through the inescapable world of the playwright.

Truth be told, the feeling you get with O’Neill’s cottage is much like the one evoked by his play – an eerie, sad strangeness- but my memory of it was invoked when director Jim Christy held rehearsals for Bruce Graham’s new play, THE OUTGOING TIDE, at Bruce’s vacation home on the Chesapeake – which acts as the very setting for the play. The actors could follow scene by scene on Bruce’s property with approximate accuracy to the text, which includes fishing off a shoreline, conferring at the kitchen table, and even watching the tide crash and roll in and out.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the actors perceived their “given circumstances” materializing in such detail – not to mention the pungent, wafting atmospherics of low tide. When I asked one of the actors about his experience, he replied, “It was really cold.” I do love that kind of frank, physiological response; it is pretty evident in the pictures taken on that day that the bundled actors braved a winter shore wind in the name of theatre. I did, however, have to ask playwright Bruce Graham his feelings on the site-specific rehearsal, to see what it was like to watch his characters move through his house and the world of the play at the same time. Unlike Eugene O’Neill, who cannot comment on his characters “ghosting” through his childhood home, how does a living playwright view this sort of enactment? With perfect, dependable candor, Bruce remarked,

“Actually, it was kinda creepy. I think I mostly stayed in my room while they rehearsed.”

Now, though THE OUTGOING TIDE and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT are both family dramas, the plays are vastly different with regard to tone – the dividing line being O’Neill’s sullenness and Graham’s humor. So, maybe, it is not the reputation of the house, but more of the act itself, which makes the “live” text intrinsically spooky. The closest I ever got to having my own on-site rehearsal was in a graveyard on a dark October night for Edgar Lee Masters’ SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY – so, yes, in my theatrical career, the pattern of creepiness continues.

THE OUTGOING TIDE at Philadelphia Theatre Company. Photo Credit: Mark Garvin. From left to right: Anthony Lawton and Richard Poe

What makes this experience even richer, though, is how it has endowed the characters with a sense of place. Their performances are now imbued with a glow of fundamental home life, with the all its hair-pulling yet tender complexities intact. That is something Bruce Graham and our audiences can take pleasure in, the joy of watching the world of THE OUTGOING TIDE ebb and flow.

Note: As a dramaturgy collective, we’ve tried to avoid reviewing the plays we’re working on, especially when it comes to new plays in development. You will often hear artistic directors of new play festivals ask politely audiences to not review plays that are receiving staged readings and there is wisdom in that. As Poor Lessing’s is in its first year, we’re trying to focus on projects that offer dramaturgs paying jobs and when the call went out to hire dramaturgs for Philadelphia Theatre Company’s new play festival, we wanted the event to be represented on our site because it was a program that employed area dramaturgs (more power to them!) In that spirit, these pieces are more dramaturgical musings, and not reviews.

For a listing of all the new plays that were read at PTC (and full plot summaries), click here.

My PTC@Play assignment was When You’re Here, a new play by Samuel D. Hunter. The play, which is set entirely in an Olive Garden restaurant, is aptly titled, and anyone familiar with the chain’s slogan can fill in the second half: “When you’re here, you’re family.” I was tasked with reading the stage directions, and since I already had my deadpan down pat I was able to sit back and mull over all things “family” while the actors and director fine-tuned their lines in preparation for the reading.

When You’re Here is nothing if not a play about family: eight of the ten characters comprise two actual families, the restaurant’s staff weave the two together and make a clan of their own, and the play is set in a small town where everyone knows everyone. On top of that, the whole thing is infused with Olive Garden’s forced, if earnest, “famiglia” mentality. Just about all the themes and conflicts revolve around familial relationships as well. While this has certainly been done before, it never gets old.

Thinking about the popularity and prevalence of “family plays,” it seems they’ve been around just as long as the dysfunctional family has – the canon is filled with classics by playwrights ranging from Sophocles to Shakespeare, and more recently from Eugene O’Neil to Tracy Letts. Family is always in vogue. Why is this? Perhaps it’s because everyone can identify with such themes, whether they hail from the lap of luxury or a hardscrabble upbringing. Judging by the audience’s vocal responses to the reading, they identified with even the most unusual and unlikable characters in this play. That’s certainly one thing about family: even if you don’t like it or want it, it’s always there in the back of your head, for better or worse. And for that very reason, it seems like plays about family will always be there, too.

Life’s a bitch, but at least we can laugh at it. This past week, I had the opportunity to work with an excellent group of people on a reading of Michael Hollinger’sHope and Gravity, part of the PTC@Play Festival hosted by Philadelphia Theater Company. The play, which consists of nine short plays fused together, is hilarious. But it’s also deeply moving and incredibly sad.

And that’s really the heart of comedy. You laugh and laugh, but if you aren’t crying a little inside when it’s all done, it really wasn’t a comedy. It was just funny. And we don’t need funny: it doesn’t go anywhere or make us reflect on the world around us. We need comedy. We need to laugh and in the end, realize what we’re laughing at and pause to think why we’re laughing.

A great scene that illustrates this occurs in Hope and Gravity. A woman has a meeting with her boss to discuss her health plan. Instead, her boss co-opts the meeting, attacking her for casting a white student to play Atticus Finch in a student production of To Kill A Mockingbird. In attempt to “diversify” the casting, the boss wants Atticus to be played by a black student, which doesn’t make sense. The scene is over-the-top, full of white people guilt and air quotes around terms that may not be politically correct. But it’s the scene’s end that hammers the point home. Sure, the audience was dying of laughter though the scene. Then the boss, the boss who tried so hard to paint himself as this sympathetic, super-PC character, denies the woman health coverage for her wife. It’s the knife twist that pulls it all together. Without it comedy, all comedy, would fall flat.

Ruminations inspired by the final Public Theater performance ofThe Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve JobsSunday, March 18, 2012 at 2pmPublic Theater, Martinson Hall, 425 Lafayetteevent site

This piece of writing can’t be a typical review for many reasons. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has been reviewed for two years in its many forms and we know what it is (one man’s story of his adoration and frustration with Apple and its cult and the factories that create the cult objects) — my summary of its journey on stage on this day plot-wise and dramatic structure-wise is now irrelevant. I thought what I was going to be doing when I purchased my ticket for this return engagement as soon as the Public Theater Member tickets became available weeks and weeks ago was to catch this piece of the cultural zeitgeist before it cut a swath somewhere else, before all the “do it yourself from the published versions of the script provided by Daisey himself with blanket permission to do just that” started springing up, crazy quilt, across the globe. I wanted to see the man himself do this show at one of his theatrical homes. And then, living in real time one of the memes of this piece of theatre, the whole megillah changed. The paradign shifted. In Daisey’s words repeated at several points of his monologue, “I can feel the metaphor shifting underneath me.”

“I was having the conversation with people in the theater industry, about how to get new audiences into the theater. And I thought, the trouble is, we’re all having this conversation amongst ourselves. Nobody’s having this conversation with people who don’t go to the theater.”—Emma Gibson

Over in Scotland, a new format of play has become a phenomenon. “A Play, a Pie, and a Pint” gives audiences a pint of beer, a piece of pie and a short, one-act play – all during lunch. According to the Guardian, “Play, Pie, Pint” will produce more shows this season than any other theater. Each runs for a week. Tiny Dynamite’s Emma Gibson, who hails from the UK, has brought the trend to the US, and more specifically, to Philadelphia. The format’s changed slightly – we prefer a slice of pizza to a meat pie and prefer to see our theater during happy hour than during our lunch breaks. Each show runs for just two performances. The first, four-play season occurred in October and the second is about to start this week.

In the spring of 2011, Tiny Dynamite was awarded a Knight Arts Challenge grant to bring “A Play, a Pie, and a Pint” to American audiences.

I recently had the chance to speak with Emma about the funding process for the project, how it differs from the UK version, and just what is so great about the one-act play.

Amy Freeman: How did getting the Knights Art challenge grant shape the project? Do you think it impacted the process?

Emma Gibson: Yes, I do. It was amazing experience getting that award because I hadn’t thought seriously doing the project until they opened the submissions. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind, you know what, I think Philadelphia needs this. This is a thing that isn’t happening here and most other things are. I really wasn’t expecting to get anywhere and then it did, so I began to structure how it would actually work.

Kittson O'Neill and Kevin Bergen in "Being Norwegian" by David Greig, the first play in the new season of A Play, a Pie, and a Pint./Photo: David O'Connor

It was $25,000 from them, and I had to match it. It was craziness. We got the notification that we got the grant in April or May and I wanted to do the first season in October, so I had basically four months to not only create this whole project but also to raise $25,000. I’d never raised any money before and that was huge. But we did it, and in a way, having that challenge meant I gave the project a much greater budget than I would normally have given it. I think I would have cut edges had I not had that money and I must say it’s been so amazing to have had that amount of money. This current season that we’re producing, one of the directors said to me, can I get union actors? And I’m like, yeah, you know what? Let’s just go for the best people we can get while we have the money because that’s all going to change after March. So I think it made a massive difference, actually. It allowed the project to get started and to get audiences interested in a great way.

Amy: I guess this is a hypothetical question. When you think about not getting the grant, how would you have seen Play, Pie, Pint? Would you have done fewer plays or hired less expensive actors?

Emma: I would probably have changed the venue. When we did the second helping at Fergie’s, I found that it was much more cost-effective and I think that’s what we’d have done, found a pub and performed it there. Society Hill, I love it there, but it’s really expensive to rent.

I wouldn’t have been able to employ union actors. I think I’d have done as many plays. Over here, one of the feedbacks I’ve been getting is people have said, you don’t need to do so many plays. But I think we do. In the UK, certainly, they’re doing way more. But I think this idea that there is such choice. It’s like a mini-season. What normal companies do in a year, we do in four weeks and there’s so much to choose from, they don’t last very long so the value is greater. So I think I would have done four.

Amy: What you were saying about venue leads into another question. So, you did it first at Society Hill, which is a theater, then you did it at Fergie’s, an actual pub. So was it different?

Emma: It was really interesting. Because when we decided to look for venues, I’d gone to Fergie’s and I thought, no, not sure about this, it’s not nice enough. I’m a real sucker for lights and sound and theaters just giving me a helping hand, so when we went first to Society Hill, Fergie was enormously supportive, came to every show. The director of “Peaches and Regalia” (the first play performed in the series) said you know, I think it would really work there [at Fergie’s]. So we tried it and it was amazing.

It almost worked better, I think. It was much more intimate. There were communal tables, so you just kind of ate and watched together. You met strangers. It had a very different feel. We served up pot pies instead of pizza, which was also much nicer, I think.

The show lost some of its nuance. On some nights, there was a lot of sound from downstairs, so the actors had to project. Artistically, it lost a little, but as far as entertainment went, the audiences loved it and we sold out every night.

Amy: Brecht would talk about how people should smoke cigars during shows, would you say it was more like that?

Emma: That’s so great. It was. At Society Hill, nobody really got up and went and got another drink. I would have been angry if they had. Whereas at Fergie’s, the first night we went on there, that’s exactly what happened. When people had finished their pint, they got up and walked in front of everybody, walked in front of the state, went and got their drink. The waitresses were milling in and out. I was getting really wound up by this. I was sitting there, thinking, ‘why aren’t they respecting the actors?’ Then I realized that it was the whole point of this. That they had this freedom and were much more relaxed. Everyone just really enjoyed that informality. I don’t know about the cigars, though.

Amy: How does this compare to the UK version?

Emma: What British pub theater actually is, compared to what we’re putting on, is miles apart. In England, I actually don’t know Scotland, I know in London, you have all these pubs. You buy your pint, and then you go downstairs to a very tiny, claustrophobic black box space and everyone drinks and watches the show. They don’t have to pay that much for rental, because they are making so much from the bar. That’s real pub theater. But I wanted to present something that people would think “oh, that’s British.” But it isn’t the same in anyway. But then again, I think it’s also very different from what they’re shown here.

Amy: Would you ever want it to go in that direction, where it was in a proper pub?

Emma: I would love it to have a home. We’re talking at the moment for two directions for it. I like the idea that it has the Society Hill initial run and then can go off to Fergie’s, then we’re going to try to get it to the Main Line. So it can travel and the shows are constantly fluid and can go anywhere. But ideally, it’d be amazing for it to have its own home, have a place with a kitchen so that we could do proper English meat pies. That would be the big dream. I just don’t see that happening at the moment.

Amy: Going off from that, you work with a couple other companies. You worked with Inis Nua, Iron Age. Do you think eventually you’d like it to be a theater community thing versus a Tiny Dynamite thing?

Emma: I think you always have to have somebody super-producing, just to organize the whole thing. The whole concept was to come into the community here in Philadelphia and say, this is for everybody. The different theater companies obviously communicate with each other and the time of day we’re doing it means that nobody’s in competition with anybody else, so it’s really just trying to create a community. People have a chance to reach out to new audiences, to try out new work, to work with new actors. It’s very low risk for them. It doesn’t cost them anything.

Amy: I read the grant online. It said that you wanted to reach a wider theater audience. Did you notice anyone for whom this was their first foray into theater?

Emma: Yeah, and I think that will grow as well. Absolutly. I truly was not expecting to sell that many seats. I’ve done two Fringe shows and honest-to-god, I knew everyone in the audience. You know, we were lucky to get 20 people. I always keep my expectations low. I care so about the project that I couldn’t bear the thought of people not seeing it.

But we did get a lot of press and that brought in people. And I knew hardly anybody in the audience. There were interesting groups. We had one group that came to Fergie’s who were a meet-up group. They were a group of women who just like going out and trying new things. They’d seen it in the Philadelphia Inquirer and thought, oh let’s try that for our next meet-up. We had a lot of people who certainly weren’t big theater buffs.

I was having the conversation with people in the theater industry, about how to get new audiences into the theater. And I thought, the trouble is, we’re all having this conversation amongst ourselves. Nobody’s having this conversation with people who don’t go to the theater.

I was on the train with my husband and we bumped into this guy who runs a pub in Malvern, really nice guy. We were telling him about the project. And he said, I’ve never been to the theater. And his friends with him all said, they’d never been to the theater. These were just normal people from my community. Then he said, “you know what, if you were serving me a beer and it didn’t take too long or be boring, then I think I might come to that.” I was like, you know what, you’re the people we should be speaking to. Do you want it shorter? We can make it shorter? Do you want a beer with that? Then fine. We’ll give you a beer with that.

Amy: What would you say, besides the briefness of it, is the joy or appeal of a one-act?

Emma: I really like the one-act. I never knew how much I liked it until I started reading them more. They’re so immediate. There’s very little exposition, they have to come straight in there. The characters have to be defined in just a few lines. Generally, there has to be only one location and they have to have a full arc, a beginning, middle and end and a moment of revelation and an “a-ha!” moment. The ones that have that are so perfect. Which one did you see?

Marcia Saunders and Maureen Torsney Weir in "Fly Me to the Moon," by Marie Jones, the third play during the first season./Photo: Emma Gibson

Amy: “Peaches and Regalia.”

Emma: “Peaches” was the simplest of them all. We had one play called “Fly Me to the Moon,” by Marie Jones, which I thought was just the most brilliantly written one-act play. It takes you places. It was slightly longer than the others and it really went in incredible directions. So much happened in the plot. I think that’s what I loved. And I love not having an intermission. I would much rather not have an intermission when I go to the theater anyway. I would much rather sit there for two hours than have it broken. I like that about the one-act: there’s no intermission.

This is a problem I came up against this time. My ear is very tuned in to the British one-act. So I can hear when it works. I found it much harder hear American one-acts. It’s a very different style.

Amy: That was another question I had. What was the difference between UK plays and US plays?

Emma: I think there’s a lot of naturalism here. It’s funny, a lot of them are therapy plays. Characters trying to work out issues – issues plays. You can’t do that in a one-act, I don’t think. Most of the plays were in restaurants or diners or bedrooms. I think season two, we have restaruant, bedroom, bedroom. And then the last one is in a taxidermy shop, so we broke the mold there.

With the British plays, I have a head start, because I get a lot of plays sent to me from Òran Mór, who have already tried and tested the plays. So I’m reading stuff that’s already been sifted through. But when I’m reading American plays, I have no idea where to turn to get playwrights, so I’m reading everything, so it becomes harder. I don’t have the ear for it yet, for the American writers.

Amy: I have written down “drink and dramaturgy.” Does the choice of play change based on knowing that people will be having a beer with it?

Emma: No. I don’t think so. I find choosing the plays is interesting. There is one group of people who think I should be more experimental with my choices. But I don’t. I feel that I just want the best writing. I want the writer to be excellent. I don’t particularly care for people playing with form in this situation. I do normally in theater, I’m all for that and and I love to see it, but I don’t think this is the place.

Amy: One last question. On the Scottish website, they have a “critic’s circle.” Audience members can write a short review of each play. Do you think that’s something you’d want to bring in?

Emma: I certainly would. Don’t they get a bottle of malt?

Amy: Yeah.

Emma: I should think about doing that, shouldn’t I? Maybe having a slip in the program, or they should email them. I think that’s a great idea.

Amy: I really like that. I wanted to read some of the reviews, but they didn’t have any posted.

[At the time of the interview. There are a few reviews posted at time of publication.]

Emma: That’s another way to get new audiences too.

Amy: Do you think that would be intimidating for a person who’s never seen a show before? To ask them to write 100 words and they’ll get a bottle of whisky? Do you think that’s something would appeal to people because there’s an incentive?

Emma: I think just getting a bottle of whisky may be enough for someone to do it. It could even be kind of anonymous. It’s a great idea.

The second season of “A Play, a Pie, and a Pint” begins March 6 at 6:30 p.m. at Society Hill Playhouse, 507 S. 8th Street, Philadelphia, PA. The plays run Tuesdays and Wednesdays through the month of March. Tickets are $15 and include a beverage and a slice of pizza (pie).

Over the past couple months I have been fortunate enough to work on a production of my favorite August Wilson piece, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, at Plays and Players in Philadelphia. As the second play in the playwright’s Pittsburgh Century Cycle, it presents us with one of the early intersections of the African-American experience in a quickly industrializing area of America. This play examines everything from race issues to economic problems to questions of identity that draw on the African as well as American experience of former slaves and their children and grandchildren.

My experience as the dramaturg began with the play’s selection last spring. I was newly made the Literary Manager and Resident Dramaturg and working on a production of Lost in Yonkers. Among my preliminary research was a need to connect myself into the process. It was more than simply providing a glossary and being there to answer questions about West African culture and its echoes throughout the past century. Not that those weren’t important to the production team and the actors, but I wanted to make the process more personal.

I found myself speaking with people who grew up in Pittsburgh, historians who knew the Hill District from August Wilson’s early years, families willing to share a piece of their community and their private history. It was beautiful to research these things, read about them in books written by experts, but one can never substitute the real thing. Hearing firsthand about a mother raising ten kids, spending every night at the dinner table. That’s beautiful. Speaking about religion and its importance to a community, as a sort of extended family, an intertwined neighborhood where everyone knows and trusts the people around them.

Telling the cast and production team about these experiences brought more stories from their own lives. Continue Reading »

I recently sat down with Mike Lew, author of InterAct Theatre Company‘s current hit play, MICROCRISIS. It was a fun and easy conversation that ranged from the zombie apocalypse to Mike’s very impromptu conversion to Islam. (Oh the things we do for love!) Later reflecting on the interview it got me thinking about what a great range there is in the paths a writer takes from first spark to finished play; and really what a great variety there is in those sparks.

MICROCRISIS, which premiered at MaYi and is getting its Philly premiere with InterAct, is a scathing satire of the financial services industry. The play imagines a second disastrous bubble built on the backs of microcredit recipients, which leaves the world’s poor even more destitute, the middle class closer to disaster, and the ultra rich a whole lot richer. Mike described his inspiration as a near fixation with the 2008 mortgage crash itself. “I was pretty obsessed with the financial crisis when it was happening and wanted to know what the deeper causes were behind it.” He said “I wanted to see what the root causes were.”

From there he realized how vulnerable we still are to bubbles and crashes. He wondered where the next one might come from and realized that a seemingly virtuous movement like microcredit could be the instrument of our destruction and that that had serious comic potential. Mike said,

“I also thought that anything that involves money that’s going to be for the greater good is going to end up getting co-opted, which it has.”

But how do you write a play, with live bodies and some human drama about abstract ideas like credit default swaps and tranching? In Mike’s comedy, the victims and the perpetrators intersect closely, so that we follow the ruin of a Ghanaian entrepreneur and an American school teacher just as closely as the internet wizard and the clueless do-gooder who are the selfish banker’s willing accomplices. We are laughing at the absurdity, but we also feel for them as the financial machine grinds them to a pulp.

Mike says his plays don’t always start out with such strong emotional arcs. He jokingly describes himself as a bit “robotic.” Lucky for him he’s married to playwright, Rehana Mirza. Together they run the MaYi Writers Lab and they often serve as dramaturgs for each other. He credits Rehana with pushing his characters into more emotionally truthful actions. “If you read (my first draft) people are behaving like sociopaths and it’s like, how can I follow this if I can’t invest in anybody?” he says. She pushes him to think as deeply about emotional logic as he does about the logic of plot and action. The result is a very funny play with a totally plausible plot driven by complicated financial instruments and a truly human cost at its climax.

Two separate ideas, both very much in the news, mixed inside a vivid imagination and guided by an emotionally astute dramaturg, make for a play that sits right in the heart of InterAct’s mission. Lucky us!